Burkean monarchist--
(Wow! What an appropriate screenname for the discussion, for certainly to a burkean that must have been a horrifying ending.)
I think there's two prongs to the question, the first is the question as it would have looked to these people, and the second is the question as it would seem to us in the circumstances we're in.
The point I've been making elsewhere on the internets is that the prospect for continued modernity with this population is dodgy at best. Literally, imagine if you had to re-start the population of the United States with whomever happened to be in airplanes at a given moment. Only those people's skills and professions would survive, and God help you with respect to the fact that some relatively survival-useless professions like salesmen, bankers and lawyers (for WIW, I'm a lawyer) but probably very few farmers. Second, think of everything that we use in our society that involves highly refined modes of production using disparate resources, like the computer I'm typing this post on. Third, in the same way that with one you had to rebuild our situation with everyone on an airplane at a given time, imagine then rebuilding the society with airplane and cruiseship reading. (Even library databases and the like would have had servers on the planets that were destroyed, so not all the knowledge survives).
And then you have to refine all this down further. Only those survivors and their knowledge survives who had FTL drives. Only those survivors and their knowledge survives who made it through Gina's nuclear suicide bombing and the New Caprica occupation.
And the series has hinted broadly enough at this. Gaius on Galacica in Season One is the all-purpose scientist because so few people with that level of technical skill survived. Kara is desperately looking for antibiotics for Anders at the end of Season Two when the cylons show up. And remember those episodes about labor unrest, where we get the idea that in keeping the tillium refineries going in the name of defense has really required a kind of quasi-forced labor.
And then finally with respect to the practical considerations, think about how the Cylons found New Caprica. Part of their gamble is about eliminating everything that could make a bang big enough to be discovered by cylons following another change-of-heart.
And finally as to why these people would make this decision: think about spending four years of your life in a tin can, as comfortless as Galactica or probably less so, for instance working the assembly line of that Tilium ship, eating algae-processed food with no such thing as outside, on the run from murderous robots. As much as I the person typing these words love my creature comforts, I can see how a Colonial who had had that life post-destruction of the twelve colonies would be glad to see things not in a Burkean light but a Rousseauan one, and make sure they were never on the inside of anythin metal ever again.
And at the same time, what imbalances in historical development come the first time one of our 150,000 years ago ancestors finds the first dead colonial with a still functioning sidearm? Do we want technology spreading freely, creating huge cultural imbalances?
I don't think the message is so much luddism (a casting off of technology because it is bad) so much as it is understanding that technological development (part of a "suite" of social advancements that include highly developed concepts like art, ethics, spirituality) can't just race ahead by itself without creating imbalances. So Lee realizes in his dialogue with his father that it might be best for humanity to focus a bit on B, C and D for a bit since A seems to have produced so much trouble for it.
Now, I buy that. And the message is one we should take away with us, although since we have not just been in a thousands-of-years-long cycle of genocidal war with unfriendly robots, this doesn't really involve anything as drastic as leaving aside our tech to go live in the woods.
I have been a Battlestar fan from the original series to the current one. Unlike some, I appreciated the differences, but noted the similarities. (Both had a theist undercurrent, as different as they were.)
However, while I expected that the some from the fleet would end up on OUR Earth, and be the ancestors of mankind, it never occurred to me that they would willingly give up their history, much less their technology. Give up their essential civilization, as must have known would happen.
As we all know, without some kind of organization of tasks, civilization--writing and accumulated knowledge--will be lost over generations. If for no other reason that people forget how to copy the books.
To send the fleet into the Sun was a waste, and a terrible plot device. Sure, start over in the Garden of Eden, but at least leave the tree of knowledge for your distant descendants.
The paradise they created means their great grandchildren die at 35 in a hunter-gather tribe from diseases that are easily avoided by knowing even the most basic forms of the germ theory of disease (ie, done keep the food next to the excrement).
While my heart did soar to hear the original series theme as the fleet soar into the star, I have to admit I was left a bit disheartened.
Perhaps if the series had ended with the Galactica's Raptors escaping an exploding ship so that they had no choice but to revert to the simplest origins, I might have felt better.
But, for humanity to simply throw away millennia of advancement and accumulated knowledge. How pathetic...
So, here's my question. Would any of you have made that choice?
